Much is being made of the highly successful S&M erotica novel 50 Shades of Grey. People are blaming feminism for making women into submissives, blaming feminism for preventing women from being submissives, blaming women for having sexual desires at all, and a whole lot of other boring and typical stuff that comes up in any conversation about women and S&M. News flash: it’s not the feminist revolution that is “causing” women to have fantasies of submission. S&M fantasies have been around since the beginning of time.

As an S&M writer, I hear a lot of allegations about how “all” (or “almost all”) women are sexually submissive and how this must Mean Something. This is echoed in the coverage of 50 Shades of Grey, in which everyone is demanding to know What It All Means About Women. I wrote a piece a while back called “‘Inherent Female Submission': The Wrong Question,” in which I took on a lot of this stuff. But there’s another submerged question here — about men. There’s plenty of talk and stereotypes about how men are inherently violent, or more aggressive than women, or “the dominant sex.”

As I said in my previous article: I think it’s quite questionable whether women are “inherently submissive,” but my conclusion is that I don’t care. It doesn’t actually matter to me whether women in general are “inherently submissive” (though I really don’t think women are), or whether submissive women’s preferences are philosophically Deep And Meaningful (though I’m not convinced they are). What matters is:

1. How women (or any other people) can explore sexually submissive preferences consensually,

2. How women (or any other people) can compartmentalize submissive preferences so that their whole lives are safe and fulfilling and happy, and

3. How women (or any other people) can be treated well in arenas that aren’t even relevant to their sexuality — like the workplace.

This is also how I feel about these ideas of “inherent male violence.” I don’t buy that men are “the dominant sex” or that men are “inherently violent.” Based on what I’ve read, it seems quite clear that individuals with higher testosterone levels — who are, incidentally, not always men — often experience more aggressive feelings. Yet that’s a far cry from large-scale generalizations, and it’s also frequently irrelevant to questions about how people can best deal with those aggressive feelings. Plus, psychological submission can be a very separate thing from physical aggression levels.

Much of the time, when it comes to aggression, anger management is the answer, the same way a naturally shy or submissive person needs to learn to set boundaries. But there are circumstances where catharsis is completely acceptable. Lots of perfectly decent men have urges towards violent dominance; what do they do about it? How much do they agonize, like Christian Grey in 50 Shades of Grey, and how much do they explore their desires in a consensual and reasonable way?

I always thought that the late-90s movie Fight Club was fascinating primarily because of its lens on masculinity and violence. It’s not just about the violence men to do each other, but to themselves. Quotes include “You have to give up; you have to know that someday you’re gonna die,” and “The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club.” I first watched it before I knew much about S&M, but now whenever I think about it, I think about how the idea of a fight club — where people would get together and fight, for catharsis and community — is so very reminiscent of how a lot of people experience S&M. Fight Club even has safewords. Someone says stop, you stop. I obviously don’t support the endpoint of the Fight Club story (i.e., blowing up buildings), but the idea of establishing a men’s community via a fight club seems reasonable to me.

So, what are the practicalities of dealing with aggressive or dominant tendencies in the sexual arena? As an S&M person, I’ve experimented with dominance as well as submission, but because violence is so associated with masculinity, I turned to some egalitarian male S&Mers for advice. I believe that even for non-S&M people, their perspectives make a really good lens for ideas of gender and violence and power. Of course, the first thing one of my friends told me was: “I’m not sure I really see dominance in general as being particularly masculine. I don’t really think it’s a gender associated thing.”

That gentleman, who comments around the Internet under the name Scootah, went on to add: “I’ve certainly worried about my kinks in the past. I mean fundamentally, I get really, really turned on by grabbing someone by the hair, throwing them into the wall, backhanding them, etc. That’s a pretty disturbing thought for an egalitarian who’s worked with abuse victims. I spend a lot of time considering the ethics of my kinks; my partners’ enthusiastic consent is a major priority.”

Jay Wiseman, author of the famous S&M primer SM101, talks about his own early fears towards the beginning of that book. He writes about how he began having sadistic fantasies, and went to the public library to research them. All he could find was portraits of serial killers, which scared the hell out of him. He writes:

I decided to keep myself under surveillance. I made up my mind that I was not going to hurt anybody. If I thought I was turning into someone that would harm somebody else, then I would either put myself in a mental institution or commit suicide. And thus I lived, waiting and watching to see if I was turning into someone that I needed to shoot.

Fortunately, Wiseman found partners who were open to exploring S&M with him, and went on to write extensively about safety and consent and communication within S&M. Trying to communicate in an egalitarian way is arguably the most complicated part of any S&M encounter; as Scootah told me, “There are certainly elements that could potentially unbalance a relationship in my favor. I’m a big reasonably strong guy. I do usually make more money than my partners. I also have this whole sense of position in the local S&M community. I mostly just try to be aware of those things. I try to be very careful about not taking advantage of that and negotiate clearly and not pressure people.”

There are lots of ways to do clear negotiation, including asking open-ended questions before any S&M actually happens: “What are you interested in? Could you go into that more?” There’s also a huge emphasis on talking through the S&M encounter afterwards, as part of the post-S&M processing we call aftercare. As another gent who goes by Noir said: “It really helped me to have a few great, feminist S&M partners. Having that echo of ‘it’s OK, I want this,’ as well as the honest feedback when I do wrong really helped shape how I experience S&M, and with who. It’s meant I learned how better to read and grasp the people in my, er, grasp.”

Noir also noted, “I strive to use dominance and submission as a tool for helping my partners become stronger, in ways that also feed my S&M preferences. For example, I tend to form long-term interests with women who want a ‘safe space’ to extend and explore their ability to be sluts, with all that can imply. But in the process, we also explore how becoming more confident in one’s sexuality also can reflect into everyday life. Also, just coming to spaces in the S&M community can be a goldmine of information. All a dominant man has to do is read, listen, open up and understand. One thing I learned was that my fears about reenforcing our messed-up society were shared by women into kink… but also that my ways of approaching the topic, as ‘oh, we’re so controlled by society!’ were themselves pushing too much agency out of women’s choices. There’s a balance there that we guys who identify as both feminist and kinky have to respect, and that can come from listening to feminist women struggle with these issues, themselves.”

The alternative sexuality advocate Pepper Mint (who has his own blog) told me that in terms of putting gender on his experiences, “I am a bit genderqueer, and I personally experience dominance with either a feminine or masculine vibe from moment to moment. Certain activities — like punching — feel masculine, while others — like whipping — feminine in the moment. Also, I switch, meaning that I don’t always take the dominant role. Strangely, my most clearly masculine S&M activity is masochism. I always feel very manly while taking pain. I don’t think I can clearly explain why these things have attached to gender in my head, though presumably I’m being affected by cultural tropes to some extent.”

The consensus in general was that dominance, whether masculine or feminine, is something that happens in an encounter… not outside it. As Pepper put it, “New guys often want to play hard or do hardcore things, and will often boast and swagger. Kinky women almost always recognize this as dangerous bullshit. Learn to chill out and not take yourself too seriously, and learn to start with a light careful touch when playing with someone new. Learn to ask for help and guidance, both from others in your S&M community and from your partners.”

Scootah agreed: “The first mistake I see newbie doms make is trying too hard to be some kind of bad ass. Admit your inexperience. Be seen learning. Be modest and have a good time. Learn to communicate well, and to really be friends with your prospective partners.”

For me, the bottom line of these conversations is that questioning gender roles, and understanding gender complications, is an ongoing process. People have a lot of urges and preferences that are politically inconvenient and which we will never fully understand. Whether we’re shaped by biology or culture, those feelings will still exist for now, and we have to deal with them. There are ways to do almost anything such that people respect each other, though — whatever the implications for gender or power. Violence is complicated ground, but it can be used in balanced and consensual ways that end up bonding people together. 50 Shades of Grey and Fight Club are both examples, and I haven’t even touched competitive sports!

* * *

This piece is included in my awesome collection, The S&M Feminist: Best Of Clarisse Thorn. You can buy The S&M Feminist for Amazon Kindle here or other ebook formats here or in paperback here.

* * *

Linkbait time! Here’s what some other folks are writing about Fifty Shades of Grey:

As a feminist, my problem with the mass-marketing of the pale, swooning female submissive tied up for the love of her man isn’t that she exists, but that no other kind of “taboo” sexual women seem to. We don’t get mainstream narratives inviting us to identify with women who like to dominate in bed, or mass-marketed portrayals of women of color and queer women as sexual heroines in control of their choices…. And therein lies the rub. When the media only repeats stories about one very narrow idea of “transgressive” female sexuality, it limits our sexual imaginations, and therefore the possibilities of our sexual lives.

* The sex & tech writer Violet Blue has a big link roundup, called Fifty Shades of Linkbait. It has some interesting articles, but I’m mostly linking to it because this line made me crack up:

Fifty Shades of Grey will be awesome for you if you secretly wish someone would do a Halle-Berry-as-Catwoman treatment to The Story Of O.

It is a story we have heard before, though I daresay Disney does a far better job in “Beauty and the Beast.” This, perhaps, is the most egregious attempt against people who live a BDSM lifestyle. Not only does Fifty Shades of Grey make broken monsters out of people who have examined their desires and had the courage to see where they will take them, but it promises readers that they can be cured — and cured through bad communication, passive aggression, and petulant fits, at that. … In telling us this story, E.L. James is directly tapping into this fantasy of transforming a lover to suit us perfectly. If I could forgive the damage she does BDSM in the process, I’d leave it alone. But I can’t.

16 Responses to ““50 Shades of Grey,” “Fight Club,” and the Complications of Male Dominance”

Our brains are highly adaptive, and there are few inherent differences between male and female brains. Testosterone may make men somewhat more aggressive, but that’s not a big difference.

Dominance and submission are neither male nor female, they are simply human.

In practice, there is of course a tendency for men to be dominant and women to be submissive. I think that is mostly down to that being the path of least resistance.
And by resistance I refer mostly to social conditioning and ability.

Boys don’t cry, don’t be a sissy, that’s gay. Grow up with that, and it’s not easy to explore your submissive side. Your typical straight male lord domly dom may be just a coward. On the dominant side of things, it’s a lot easier to get away with that.

Girls, on the other hand, are taught to be meek. Assertive women are quickly derided as bitches and worse.
Obedience has been part of the gold standard of wifeyness for a long, long time, long before it ended up in the bible.

As for ability, I mean the physical ability to dominate. When you want to grab someone’s hair and throw them into the wall, it’s a lot easier for men to rely on their muscles.
Without that, you have to rely on restraints, other tools or your bottom’s cooperation/obedience. Using them instead of your own muscle is somewhat unnatural, I suppose, much like travelling in a vehicle is unnatural when you have legs to walk on. That’s civilization for you.

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And you’re right, questions like how to prevent submission from leaking into other areas of your life like the workplace are more important than any of this.

On a completely different note, I’d like to thank you for mentioning competitive sports. I’d love to see a post on that if you’re so inclined. I’ve always thought of S&M like a kind of sport and other than the occasional martial arts reference, I’ve never seen anyone else put those things together in any way (though my reference sample is by no means exhaustive). I guess I’ve always felt like I come at S&M kind of sideways compared to most people.

I think most of the dominance in BDSM is aesthetical rather than the materialistic dominance of forms of oppression such as sexism, racism, classism, etc. Sports are also largely aesthetical, in that the rules are designed to produce a particular aesthetic.

WRT to Fight Club, one of the interesting things that I’ve noticed is how the ending metaphor has resurfaced, from time to time: in his social commentary, for example, Kevin Craft (the comedian, not the athlete) tends to refer to race as “all the same skin, but with different credit scores.” And that’s what Project Mayhem targeted. The credit bureaus.

For all its talk of soap, I think that’s what it was about, after all: the complicated or confidential structures that we need, in order to come clean. Which, too, is why there was so much of a focus on the support groups in the film. Much easier to get people to listen in that way when you’re dying; they expect you to. Not so much when they think that you still have a life to live.

When it comes to the OP, and especially the quotes from Noir, I think that these speak to similar things.

Definitely … I’ve thought about writing some kind of post about masculinity and submission, but bloggers like maymay and Bitchy Jones have done a better job than I could, I think. Too bad Bitchy took down most of her blog. I once emailed her begging to let me repost one of her posts, but she said no because she might want it for something someday.

@Lyoness — I’d like to thank you for mentioning competitive sports. I’d love to see a post on that if you’re so inclined. I’ve always thought of S&M like a kind of sport…. I guess I’ve always felt like I come at S&M kind of sideways compared to most people.

I don’t know that much about competitive sports, or I’d consider it. When I hear about the way people play hard and then comfort each other afterwards, I often think of S&M these days. It took me a long time to start thinking that way, though. I’ve pointed out in the past that one thing stigma does is make things seem more different from each other than they really are. Even for those of us into S&M, I think we’re so accustomed to thinking of it as its own Big Thing, when really it’s just on a continuum of behaviors. In Confessions I tried to talk about this idea of “strategic ambiguity” as the unifying theory, but it certainly could be something else … the one thing I’m sure of is that there is a unifying theory, or at least some unifying themes.

@machina — I think most of the dominance in BDSM is aesthetical rather than the materialistic dominance of forms of oppression such as sexism, racism, classism, etc.

yeah. I think people get confused because of how the BDSM-aesthetics mirror real forms of oppression. It’s sort of like blaming an art piece for what it depicts, though.

@Infra — Much easier to get people to listen in that way when you’re dying; they expect you to. Not so much when they think that you still have a life to live.

Huh. This makes me think tangentially of the S&M-as-therapy question. People talk about this a lot (and I’ve had some experiences along those lines) but I hadn’t connected it in this way before …. I’ve been meaning to write a post on aftercare and the emotional power of it, and maybe this is part of it too: getting an intimate space where the two just listen to each other?

The question about competitive sports interests me particularly, because of this post from last year. I think I, personally, don’t see BDSM as being similar enough to that to be worth the comparison, but there’s definitely energies that come from a similar place – they’re just mingled with different other energies to produce the two different types of involvement.

But I do think that the Badass Bottom archetype that Staci Newmahr identifies (I do some discussion here) is a type that might easily see BDSM in those terms – Newmahr wrote:

Badass bottoming approaches SM play competitively. It is an explicit dare, either to self or other. It can be internally competitive, in which the bottom seeks to withstand or endure more than ever before or more than the bottom thinks he or she can. It can also, though less commonly, seek to outlast the top or exceed the top’s physical or ethical limits.

The Bad ass Bottom thing is interesting for me. I’m not a masochist. I don’t like pain. I don’t like being out of control and I like the top role. I like hurting people. My head space in almost all circumstances is teddy bear/carer/nice and friendly guy – but my head space for play is very much about exploring my inner primitive and the rough/dominant/sadistic thing.

The exception is kind of a bad ass bottom thing. It’s rare, but I’ve kind of had to review my long held position on not bottoming to be one that I do bottom, but that it’s only as an extension of my inner urge to be a bad ass. A couple of years ago I went on a tear and in two sittings had 3 piercings in a jacobs ladder, a frenum piercing, both nipples, my labret and an extra ear piercing done. In one of those sessions I had the first cut of a Gene Simmons (cutting the frenum under the tongue) while getting head from my partner. This year I’ve had 7 liquid nitrogen brands, and flesh hooks. I’m currently researching tongue splitting and artist shopping for a tattoo that’s looking like about 16 hours in the chair.

Those experiences are all fundamentally me bottoming to someone. And that’s a really hard thing for me to conceptualize. I’m so comfortable with the idea that I don’t bottom. I don’t enjoy the pain at all. Except flesh hooks gave me one of the most intense highs of my life. I went back for more and more brands. But I really don’t enjoy the pain. I don’t think? Maybe I’m just a huge bad ass. That idea sits much more comfortably…

I can’t process the being out of control thing happily at all. The gene simmons cut was pushing my triggers in a huge way (I have a massive phobia of dentists, from when as a small child they suggested surgically trimming my tongue). The Bad assness of getting a blowjob through it was the only way I could think of at the time to process that experience and cope. Sitting in place to have the fles hooks done and not running away was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done – and I spent a lot of time drawing on my inner need to be a bad ass to get through that. The tattoo thing is already half planned for a pretty girl to come and watch me have it done – and if I’m honest, part of that appeal is that I think I’m more likely to put up with a long and painful session if I have someone watching who I want to impress. I’m still trying to figure out how I’ll get through the tongue splitting thing – might have to try the blow job idea again…

It’s a weird head space for me. I don’t have any issue with it being ‘gay’. I have sex with guys – my gayness isn’t a head space tripping point. But there’s certainly some kind of cognitive disconnect between my sense of identity and the role of bottoms. I don’t exactly know why – Some the guys I respect most and most want to be like are bottoms. But for some reason I need the ‘bad ass’ thing to be there before I can bottom. And even then – it’s not an easy thing. The list of people I’d even think about trusting to ‘Top’ me in those scenes is very, very short.

As a note, the book Fight Club ends differently than the movie, but I won’t spoil it in case you want to read it (and haven’t already).

Regarding Lyoness’s talk of sports, that brings to mind UFS and similar things, for me. That is very typically a male-dominated sport (there are female leagues, but they are have far fewer participants and fans*), but at the same time I know a lot of women that follow it closely. In fact, I just watched the last fight at the house of a female feminist friend of mine.

[…] gender studies and because I follow feminist pro-sex blogger Clarisse Thorn (who has discussed the complications of male dominance in the context of 50 Shades). I think it’s great that this book has allowed people to talk about sex, has gotten people […]

Clarisse, your post is very sensitive. But I think you’re missing the more obvious and relevant complications of male dominance, which is not about how a man can or should treat/regard his SO in a relationship; that’s something that can be addressed constructively with honesty, as you say.

The bigger issue is how a man should/needs to treat/present to women that he’s never met before and doesn’t have any relationship with yet; specifically, how does he need to deal with being dominant in order to get into a relationship in the first place?

Restricting my point to just cis-het folks for now, the word from relationship guru Susan Walsh is that “women want to be dominated” as a general rule, and so “men must bring a baseline level of dominance” from the get-go in order to have any chance, in the average case, of getting into any kind of sexual relationship. To me this prescription, that men are advised — if not required (!) — to assume an air of superiority as a default attitude toward women, even before they learn the woman’s preferences, conflicts pretty strongly with any notion of basic sexual equality. (Projecting any particular attitude after learning a woman’s preferences is just service work, ie it’s just play dominance that doesn’t satisfy her need for true dominance.) And yet I think the “baseline dominance required” theory does offer a pretty good description of mainstream cis-het interactions, much as it saddens me to admit it.

So, to me, this is the trickier task by far: not how to compartmentalize in dealing with just one person you know and trust pretty well, but how to travel on two tracks — reflexively egalitarian in the office, reflexively dominant in the bar after work — when dealing with the opposite sex in the world at large. With your respect for the wisdom of PUA’s I thought you might have a unique view here.

I don’t have time to respond in-depth right now, but I will just note that Susan Walsh is a headliner anti-feminist. I don’t think she’s wrong about everything, but I have serious problems with her framing on most things. I will try to think of something when I get home in about an hour.

You know, what always gets me about the whole “baseline dominance required” theorem is that you really could just say “confidence” and it would be more accurate. I don’t think I actually have much more to say about the topic than that. All genders are greatly aided by confidence while dating. High social status helps too — and counterfeiting the signals that go along with high social status can help too — so I suppose you could call that “dominance,” but that always seems like muddying the waters to me.

what always gets me about the whole “baseline dominance required” theorem is that you really could just say “confidence” and it would be more accurate.

I think confidence covers a lot of the phenomenon, but I don’t think it explains it entirely. I seems to me that confidence can go together with a lot of behaviors, not all of which I’d call dominant. A confident person will be more open to suggestions of others, for example, because they won’t easily get defensive. But that would be hardly dominant. Confidence is extremely attractive in everyone, not just men, so there must be something else if there actually *is* something like that.

And I think there is something to it, although everyone has a hard time actually describing it because, I believe, it’s something that’s not well covered by the common categories of the debate, like “nice guys vs assholes”, or “vanilla vs bdsm”. I believe that bdsm can teach a lot of behavioral strategies, but that’s something different.

To me, the baseline required male dominance is something that is like what I would describe as the “perfect male touch” (and a lot of women I talked to about this, agreed). It’s firm, decisive, confident and yet there is the implied understanding that one glance is sufficient to let go. In a way, it’s a “dominance” that’s not demanding or pushy, but facilitating and leading by implication. I think the (although often misunderstood) notion of “shit test” has to be seen in this light.

I think there’s also a lot of confusion between initiation and dominance, because, like confidence and dominance, these concepts are overlapping to a degree.

I’m not sure, but writing this I’m remembering a story a male acquaintance once told me about how he got to do business with a company after having sex with a female executive. Not quid pro quo, as they met privately, unaware of their business interests, but once they got to know each other a little, and realized she was professionally dominant, she expected him to become privately submissive. He did the opposite and behaved dominantly when they were together (like ordering her around, telling her to shut up while she was giving him head, and the like). Afterwards she told him that *that* was when she realized she both respected him as a man *and* would be interested to do business with him.

So, well, I suppose a lot of the question asked by uncalledfor comes down to the question of what kind of “true” dominance is asked for. Or rather, what “true dominance” means. I mean, take BDSM and explicit negotiations, consent and safewords – does that allow “true” dominance?

I think as long as we’re not talking about a consent that cannot even be expressed because it’s only really consent if it’s not expressed, then the answer to uncalledfor’s question would be: better performance and/or changing demand. No doubt that masculine performance has become more complex given that it can no longer rely on external cultural crutches to the extent it could only a generation ago. And no doubt women are a lot more open to expressions of their own desire today.

So part of it is implicit changes. But, better performance. How do we get there? That’s the big question, in my opinion. This stuff would have to be taught in school ;)

[…] delve into the problems of the characters' BDSM relationship since it's already been written about. There are essentialisms everywhere, mostly centred around Ana being justified in being pathetic, […]

About Clarisse

On the other hand, my latest book is about the history, stereotypes, and culture of BDSM:

I give great lectures on my favorite topics. I've spoken at a huge variety of places — academic institutions like the University of Chicago; new media conventions like South By Southwest; museums like the Museum of Sex; and lots of others.

I established myself by creating this blog. I don't update the blog much anymore, but you can still read my archives. My best writing is available in my books, anyway.

I've lived in Swaziland, Greece, Chicago, and a lot of other places. I've worked in game design, public health, and bookstores. Now I live in San Francisco, and I make my living with content strategy and user research.